* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

When electoral procedures lose popular legitimacy, it is nearly impossible to get that legitimacy back. Elections are one great way of building popular legitimacy, and if by assumption they no longer do, what will?

Non-electoral sources of power are particularly dangerous when elections no longer legitimately empower politicians. It now falls to the very politicians who are involved in the recount to vouch for its legitimacy. The safest way to defend that legitimacy would be for the losing candidates to rebuke the President, directly and publicly. A public endorsement would be most meaningful if it were to come from, for example, DeSantis. Let us just ponder how likely that is.

The downstream consequences from the loss of electoral legitimacy are nearly impossible to predict. I suspect that one consequence will be an ever-greater tolerance for executive malfeasance, on the logic that Congressional representatives and state governments lack democratic legitimacy.

* “It’s annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long,” said freshman Mitchel Storman, 14, who spends close to five hours a day on Summit classes in algebra, biology, English, world history, and physics. “You have to teach yourself.”

It is impossible, after thousands of years of human civilization, that there is still "low hanging fruit" in the realm of pedagogical effectiveness. Everyone knows, in their heart of hearts, that effectiveness tracks closely with teacher attention and resources. That's it.

The last generation of educational policy in America has been based on a systematic refusal to do the only thing that works, because that costs money. That's it. It's all a complete scam, and again, an entire generation's education has been sacrificed on that altar.

* It has by the fall of 2018 become commonplace to describe the 499 known victims of Larry Nassar as “breaking their silence,” though in fact they were never, as a group, particularly silent. Over the course of at least 20 years of consistent abuse, women and girls reported to every proximate authority. They told their parents. They told gymnastics coaches, running coaches, softball coaches. They told Michigan State University police and Meridian Township police. They told physicians and psychologists. They told university administrators. They told, repeatedly, USA Gymnastics. They told one another. Athletes were interviewed, reports were written up, charges recommended. The story of Larry Nassar is not a story of silence. The story of Larry Nassar is that of an edifice of trust so resilient, so impermeable to common sense, that it endured for decades against the allegations of so many women.Amazing deep read on the Larry Nassar case and how he got away with his crimes for so long.

* “It is almost like a punch in the gut. Like, wow, you’ve really gone this far to affect children? And it’s just like, have we sunk this low? That’s my feeling,” said the official, who could not speak on the record about the policy.Knife Salesman Very Sad About Stabbing.

So after all the ritual abasements, Amazon just picked the east coast cities that gave them the most proximity to cultural and political power. Would love to see numbers on how much other cities spent—and how much more they were willing to spend—to host an overgrown parasite.

What if I told you one of the largest ever undertakings in American historic preservation was happening not through the graces of any large institution, but through the autonomous participation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals across the country, who are collectively stitching together their own narrative of architectural history?

The “Kmart” group on the photo-sharing website Flickr has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject, a struggling American discount store. It hardly matters that, against the grain of the high-architectural image factory, many of these photos could not be called artistic—a number of them appear to have been taken with shaky cell phones, or from the wrong side of a speeding car. The production of high-gloss photography is not the purpose of this group. It’s purpose is to document a slow extinction.

* But Neel makes the unifying, underlying dynamics hard to deny — dynamics of dwindling state resources, growing demands stemming from unfolding climate catastrophe and rising superfluity, and deepening threats to government capacity and legitimacy. This is stark terrain that too few scholars glimpse with any clarity. Its implications are massive.

* The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”… Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?

Every mass media outlet talking about the climate report: “If we don’t get serious soon, bad stuff will start to happen.” This is denialism along multiple vectors: very bad stuff is already happening, it will continue to happen regardless of what we do, and we won’t do anything.

I’ve lost hope that there’s anything to do about climate change except some sort of likely catastrophic geoengineering intervention — but even if we do it and it works we will need massive intervention in the operation of global society to ameliorate the harms already baked in.

* Mr. Weiner, who is married with four children, rebuts the claim. But he acknowledges that he was not a perfect boss. “I’m sad that I might have caused people anguish in the job, or made people unhappy,” he said. “Might have? I did.”

* “The comic book industry is made up of freelancers. I think a lot of readers don’t understand the extent of that reality,” Cain says. “Certainly any comic book by Marvel or DC, those are the work of freelancers: Colorists, inkers, pencilers, letterers, cover artists, and writers. The editors work for the company. The freelancers don’t. Maybe some of them have exclusive contracts, which means that they get a little bit more money per page, and absolutely no benefits or protections, plus they don’t get to work for anyone else — but basically, every comic you pick up has been made by someone without health insurance. But these freelancers are still expected to behave like employees. They are told what to say and when to say it… I’ve said it before, but this whole industry is a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. It’s astonishing.”

What if the problem isn't stimulants but the mandate for productivityWhat if the problem isn't benzos but the mandate to stay calm in actual chaosWhat if the problem isn't opioids but the mandate to work like a machine that can't suffer to keep you and your loved ones alive

If you call Qanon people crazy it just hardens their stance. Let's open our intellectual debate to the iconoclasts who believe Democrats, Tom Hanks, and US intel agencies are engaged in a worldwide pedophilic conspiracy to take down Trump. (cc: op-ed page editors.)

* Plymouth State University said Wednesday that a retired professor who defended a convicted child rapist in a letter to the court will not be rehired as an adjunct instructor or “in any other capacity.” Two other faculty members who defended the Plymouth State graduate and high school guidance counselor convicted of sexually assaulting a student will complete sexual harassment training prior to their return to campus and will work closely with other professors upon their return, the university also said.

* But in order to turn a story about the U.S. politics of climate change into a story about the entirety of the human species, Rich has to make a strange argument. He has to dispatch with the two most powerful and prominent enemies of a climate policy in the United States: the fossil-fuel industry and the Republican Party.

Worth considering: basically nobody responsible for the financial crisis, Iraq War or 9/11 intel/security failures was held accountable or faced serious career consequences. In fact, many of them got richer, became more powerful & accrued more social status. This seems important.

* At some point in the process, all four of these nominees—Haynsworth, Carswell, Bork, and Ginsburg—seemed like shoo-ins for confirmation, much as Kavanaugh does today. And yet they were all defeated. And the Justices who took their places were closer to the judicial and political mainstream.

* …in the U.S., water park rides are not tightly regulated. Although the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission has the authority to set safety standards for such products as baby cribs and bicycles, it has no authority to regulate water parks. That responsibility lies entirely with the states. Some states have agencies that inspect water parks; others rely on the parks’ own insurance companies to do inspections. Texas law, for instance, says that a park must obtain a $1 million liability policy for each of its rides and must have all rides inspected once a year by an inspector hired by the insurance company. But there is nothing in the law that requires the inspector to have any particular certifications. Nor does the law require an inspector to evaluate the safety of such factors as the ride’s speed or the geometric angle of its slide path. According to Texas Department of Insurance spokesman Jerry Hagins, the inspector is charged only with making sure that the ride is in sound condition and meets the “manufacturer’s specifications.” In other words, a water park is allowed to police itself.

* Once upon a time, the house on Red Bark Lane wasn’t just another address in a sprawling suburban development: It was originally built as a nearly exact three-dimensional replica of 742 Evergreen Terrace, the Springfield residence of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson. Working on a short schedule, architects and builders de-fictionalized the home featured in The Simpsons for a 1997 giveaway that was intended to leave one lucky fan with the ultimate in cartoon memorabilia. No detailwas spared, from a food dish for their cat, Snowball II, to Duff beer cans in the fridge.

But controversy soon erupted in this faux-Springfield mock-up. The homeowner’s association wasn’t keen on having a cartoon house that broke conformity requirements by being painted solar yellow. The sweepstakes winner rejected it outright. And the current owner had to learn to live with the property being a source of perpetual curiosity for fans of the show who brazenly turn her doorknobs and peer through her windows at all hours of the day and night. As it turns out, the reality of living in a fantasy can get a little complicated.

A male US officer falsely told a 10-year-old she could see her mother for an hour at 6:00p. The child was held in a windowless, constantly lit facility where she couldn’t determine the time of day. When she asked the officer for the time, he said he wasn’t permitted to tell her. https://t.co/ufNCH1rpfr

17 y/o girl, separated from her mom, on a 2 y/o girl being held in the same "cage": "When I came back the little girl was crying and needed a new diaper. No one was helping her. The guards treat her like any other older kid. They call her name and expect her to get in line." pic.twitter.com/g0IpAyM5xP

In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.

* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.

* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.

In the scene where the Romans try to locate the rebel leader Spartacus in the captured slave army, most of the other slaves also identify themselves as being named "Spartacus". The movie never explains this coincidence.

The @washingtonpost opinion staff should be ashamed of themselves for letting Michael Anton run this garbage op-ed. This, for example, is one of the most misleadingly edited quotes I've ever seen: pic.twitter.com/gARKf2OL1B

Adding the extra "or" completely changes the meaning of the sentence, and IDK if editors actually look up quotes provided in op-eds or not, but maybe you should when the writer was a comms guy for a notoriously dishonest admin & wrote the Flight 93 election piece?

[really getting into it] We need new, disruptive models of citizenship for a challenging new era. Instead of where you're born or where you live, why not base citizenship on relevant factors, like tax bracket, Amazon Prime membership status, or your credit rating?

* I went to try to find some answers about Lane. I discovered that his life leading up to the killing — isolated, dependent, resentful, and ruled by the perverse incentives of internet content production — has much to tell us about the kind of man for whom the new fringes of American life are most dangerous. In his room, online, as a combatant in an endless culture war, Lane found what had eluded him everywhere else in life: a sense of purpose. And then something happened that threatened to take it all away.

* Watching the Best Episodes of Star Trek Makes It Feel as Dark as Black Mirror. I think this is an interesting phenomenon that might have some real explanatory power as to why Star Trek reception/fandom is so screwed up, especially when you factor in the various way(s) Trek is rewatched by its most devoted fans. It extends to other fandoms as well of course: Star Wars fandom has been roiled for decades by the question of whether Empire is paradigmatic of what Star Wars is, or an exception to it…